[ih] History of Naming on The Internet - is it still relevant?

[Brian E Carpenter]

Two interesting documents from a historical point of view, indeed.

I wonder how carefully people considered all this before defining local., localhost. and recently internal. . They doesn't score well on location invariance, and they create interesting problems for the web's "origin" model (https://wicg.github.io/local-network-access/).

Regards
    Brian Carpenter

On 21-Jul-25 10:24, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote:
> Naming on the net is becoming far more complex in several dimensions.
> 
> Here's links to a couple of things I wrote about this.
> 
> The first is a note (to the National Research Council study to which
> Patrik referred) that questions some assertions that are made about DNS
> and the notion of a Global Uniform Internet Name Space.  (I discuss
> things like location, client, and temporal invariance, none of which
> actually apply to DNS.)  The note has lots of other material, the part
> about invariance begins with the heading "Chasing the Chimera of the
> Global Uniform Internet Name Space" on the 4th slide.
> 
> As the net takes on some aspects of long-term information storage - like
> the wonderful Internet Archives or Carl Malamud's amazing efforts - we
> may need to consider ways to lock-down names and their links to the
> content in ways that resist erosion, cancellation, usurpation, change,
> or manipulation.  We may also need to consider name versus attribute
> based modes of finding and connecting to things on the net (some of our
> search engines may be evolving towards the latter.)
> 
> https://www.cavebear.com/archive/rw/nrc_presentation_july_11_2001.pdf
> 
> The second is a note about the question of "what are we naming?" This is
> particularly an issue in modern applications in which the network
> partner of a client may move, split, or merge during a client-service
> interaction (and thus take on different IP addresses and port numbers
> [and different transport connections] as that interaction progresses
> over time.)  (This is why I am so fond of the idea of an association
> protocol layer between applications and our transport layers.)  The
> ISO/OSI folks may have wrestled with this via things like "application
> entity titles", but they didn't do a very good job of expressing the
> problem they were trying to solve or their solutions.
> 
> https://www.cavebear.com/archive/public/cloud-entities.pdf
> 
>           --karl--
> 
> 
> On 7/20/25 1:34 AM, Patrik Fältström via Internet-history wrote:
>> On 19 Jul 2025, at 19:55, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>>
>>> So, my question is -- How has the Internet mechanisms for Naming evolved over the last 55 years, from the Users' perspective?   Is Naming even still relevant on The Internet?
>> There are different things hidden in what you ask for. Names, addresses and identifiers. Being able to identify and access individual items, the ability for you to refer to something and have that referral be stable over time, and over geography (you give the identifier to me).
>>
>> A good report that I helped writing with many others many years ago (in 2005) I think expresses this in a still very good way:
>>
>> National Research Council. Signposts in Cyberspace: The Domain Name System and Internet Navigation. Washington, DC, USA: The National Academies Press, 2005. ISBN: 978-0-309-09640-9
>> https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/11258/signposts-in-cyberspace-the-domain-name-system-and-internet-navigation
>>
>> A presentation from RIPE-50 can be found here: https://ripe50.ripe.net/presentations/ripe50-plenary-mond-signposts-cyberspace.pdf
>>
>> With that as a background, I think your additional "spice", "from the User's perspective", is very interesting.
>>
>> What does that mean?
>>
>> ;-)
>>
>> Patrik -- also using AI for many things that I yesterday did use search engines (or guessed), and before that books
>>
>>